8th Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of the 8th convocation (Ukrainian: Верховна Рада України VIII скликання, Verkhovna Rada Ukrayiny VIII sklykannia) is the current convocation of the legislative branch of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's unicameral parliament. The 8th convocation meets at the Verkhovna Rada building in Kiev, having begun its term on November 27, 2014 following the last session of the 7th Verkhovna Rada. Its term will last five years and is scheduled to close its last session on November 27, 2019.

On the first day of the parliament's session, five of the parliament's pro-European parties, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, People's Front, Self Reliance, Fatherland, and Radical Party, signed a coalition agreement. Per the coalition agreement, the current convocation of parliament will be tasked with passing major reforms to ensure Ukrainian membership in European institutions such as the European Union and NATO, while dealing with the threat of further Russian aggression in the Donbass.

Prior to the parliament's official swearing-in ceremony, Volodymyr Groisman was the chairman of the parliament's preparatory deputy group, with Oksana Syroyid as deputy, and Pavlo Pynzenyk as the secretary.[4] Two deputies, Vitali Klitschko, and Ihor Palytsia rejected their parliamentary mandates to remain in office as Mayor of Kiev and Governor of Odessa Oblast, respectfully.[5] Meanwhile, the parliament's preparatory deputy group adopted a resolution which accepted Nadiya Savchenko's handwritten letter stating that she accepted her parliamentary mandate. Savchenko was held captive by the Russian government from June 2014 until May 2016, after being abducted during the pro-Russian unrest.[6]

Since November 28, 2014, the 8th Verkhovna Rada consists of a total of 420 people's deputies, which belong to one of six political party factions, two parliamentary groups, or the 38 unaffiliated people's deputies.[17] For the first time in Ukrainian history, the Communist Party has failed to gain representation in the Verkhovna Rada.[18]

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR), which had 40 seats in the previous parliament's convocation, did not participate in the election independently. For the 2014 parliamentary election, UDAR merged their electoral lists with that of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, being allocated 30 percent of bloc's electoral list.[19]

A large portion of the 8th Verkhovna Rada are freshmen people's deputies who did not have any prior legislative service.[20] This convocation of parliament also has the largest representation of women in the Ukrainian parliament for the first time in history. While the women participation rate in parliament is lower than the 25.3 percent average of the OSCE member states,[21] 49 of the deputies in parliament are women (approximately 12 percent).[20]

Out of the newly elected deputies, 410 of them possess an academic degree; a further 144 deputies possess two or more such degrees.[20] Fifty-four deputies are currently candidates for doctoral sciences, while 27 of them already possess a doctoral degree.[20] The oldest member of parliament is the Opposition Bloc's Yukhym Zvyahilsky, who was elected from a constituency seat in northern Donetsk.

^Revival was briefly called Economic Development in 2014. It was also a parliamentary group like People's Will until 2015.

^People's Will is a parliamentary group. Parliamentary groups consist of non-partisan deputies or representatives of parties that did not overcome election threshold (i.e. Svoboda, Strong Ukraine, etc.).

^The People's Will deputy group in previous convocation was known as Sovereign European Ukraine.

^People's Front is a September 2014 split off from Fatherland; many current members of the People's Front were members of the Fatherland faction of the previous convocation.[27][28]

^The Opposition Bloc consists mainly of former members of former President Yanukovych's Party of Regions,[29] which formed the largest caucus after the 2012 election with 185 deputies, although after the removal of Yanukovych and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, the caucus consisted of only 78 members.

On December 4, 2014, the Verkhovna Rada approved the composition of its 27 committees and one special control commission.[37][38] On December 11, 2014, parliament voted in favor of recalling all of the deputies who voted for the January 16th "dictatorship laws" of the previous convocation from their positions in committee leadership. Deputy Chairman Oksana Syroyid proposed this measure, which was adopted with 264 votes in favor.[39]

Numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of deputies in each committee and the special control commission

On December 11, 2014, the Yatsenyuk Government presented its course of action for the following year. It was proposed that the number of deputies in parliament be decreased to 150. According to estimates, adopting such a constitutional amendment would save ₴424 million annually (approx. US$26 million).[40] As part of a separate reform effort, the governing coalition proposed removing parliamentary immunity for deputies.

In the Verkhovna Rada, impersonal voting (referred to as button pushing, from the Ukrainian: "кнопкодавство") has been a serious problem in parliament for many years. The deputies of the current convocation to vote impersonally have already been recognized less than a week into parliament's first session.[41] Members of the nationalist Svoboda political party, which was elected into the parliament's previous convocation, proposed making deputies criminally liable for impersonal voting and banning them from holding any future parliamentary mandates.[42] Members from the coalition's Petro Poroshenko Bloc have also recognized the need to ban impersonal voting.[43][44]